Jeff Sessions Wants Your Weed (Among Other Things)

In an administration brimming with toxic nostalgia, there is perhaps no more absurd pusher of outdated, debunked, and ultimately destructive policy than Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. After a period of progress on criminal justice in Washington—at least with regard to tone and rhetoric—the former Alabama senator is shifting into reverse and slamming on the gas. He has moved to reinstitute mandatory minimum sentencing whenever possible, a cornerstone of the War on Drugs which led to overly harsh sentencing, ballooned the prison population, and made hardened criminals out of nonviolent drug offenders. Sessions has reversed the Obama administration's planned phase-out of private prisons for housing federal inmates—after all, he intends to have a lot more to house. And perhaps most absurd of all, he has embraced 1980s rhetoric and policy on marijuana, even parroting Nancy Reagan's past-parody invocation to "Just Say No."

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In February, Sessions announced he was forming a "Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety" to, among other things, review federal marijuana policy. But rather than instruct the D.E.A. to revisit its classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic—on par with heroin, ecstasy, and peyote—criminal justice reform advocates immediately feared Sessions would seek to draw a link between marijuana and violent crime, using it as an excuse to crack down. Now, Sessions' Task Force is set to release a report to that effect that will, according to The Hill, "link marijuana to violent crime and recommend tougher sentences for those caught growing, selling and smoking the plant." That's in line with Sessions' recent activity:

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Sessions sent a letter in May asking congressional leaders to do away with an amendment to the DOJ budget prohibiting the agency from using federal funds to prevent states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana."

According to a response from the Brennan Center, the new report may also link immigration to violent crime.

On the other hand, between 1970 and 2008, the War on Drugs led the U.S. incarceration rate to grow five-fold to create the largest prison population in the world. The burden of that fell overwhelmingly on minority communities. The policy did little to curb drug addiction, and ultimately served to benefit Mexican drug cartels and other outfits from the murky depths of the criminal underworld. We then spent about $1 trillion fighting those traffickers and locking people up. But by all means, let's keep trying it at a time when states—whose "rights" Sessions and other conservatives so frequently claim to champion—are moving towards more sane policies that seek to treat addiction, allow marijuana for medical use in people who need it, and increasingly, acknowledge that people are going to use a substance that is far less damaging than alcohol. Already, eight states and the District of Columbia have moved to legalize weed for recreational use, while 21 states have allowed it on a medical basis.

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Oh, and it creates jobs: According to CNBC, legal cannabis is now a $6 billion industry employing 150,000 people. By 2020, it will create more jobs than the manufacturing sector.

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Sessions will trample on the rights of these states and their citizens to make their own policy—policy that's been shown to be more effective on a variety of bases than the anachronistic Drug War. It's strange how Small Government Defenders of Liberty tend to advocate government intervention in people's lives when it involves what they ingest and who they get in bed with. The principle seems especially flexible for Sessions, who also advocated giving police more power to seize your property without even charging you with a crime when he called for expanding civil forfeiture last week.

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Perhaps Sessions is just a little confused with everything that's on his plate. His boss referred to him as "beleaguered" this week, perhaps because it just emerged that he did, in fact, discuss campaign matters with Russian officials during the 2016 election. He explicitly denied that—and meeting with any Russian officials—under oath while testifying before Congress during his confirmation hearings. Considering a Justice Department special counsel is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign, such as Sessions, colluded with Russian officials to influence that election, this is not altogether good news for the attorney general.